Frost-chilled days give way to colder nights, but the warmth of Snowdown calls together kindred spirits and foes alike. Snow Day Singed, Snowstorm Sivir and Winter Wonder Lulu have suited up in their Snowdown finest, joining the celebration along with all of the former Snowdown skins returning to cavort in the cold:

Snow Bunny Nidalee

Workshop Nunu

Happy Elf Teemo

Earnest Elf Tristana

Old Saint Zilean

Re-Gifted Amumu

Santa Gragas

Reindeer Kogâ€™Maw

Candy Cane Miss Fortune

Ragdoll Poppy

Nutcracko

Silent Night Sona

Festive Maokai

Bad Santa Veigar

Mistletoe LeBlanc

Snow Day Ziggs

Dark Candy Fiddlesticks

Toy Soldier Gangplank

Snowmerdinger

Slay Belle Katarina

But it wouldnâ€™t be Snowdown without a showdown! This Snowdown, weâ€™re excited to introduce the ShowdownÂ featured game modeÂ on Howling Abyss. Featuring 1v1 and 2v2 battles to test how well you wield your weapons in the winter chill, you can enter Showdown throughout Snowdown this year!

Returning Snowdown ward skins, plus a new addition to the ward skin line up, will light the way to the festivities with some surprises in store for mystery gifting, new skins and new icon rewards to earn. Check back withÂ leagueoflegends.comÂ for more information about the event and weâ€™ll see you on the battlefields!

The spotlights are on, the musicians are at the ready and the Spirit Rush is on. Popstar Ahri announces her presence, shooting a pulsing blue Spirit Orb across the stage. The notes surge from the speakers and seem to take on a life of their own around the pop darling. The crowd rushes the stage and Popstar Ahri charms the crowd with a night of song and dance.

No, not that one. Are games becoming more passive with less opportunities to shut down the opponent?

Where do you want snowballing to be at for it to feel like a fun mechanic?

Zileas: Ideally, we want teams to snowball less… and individuals to snowball as much or more — which is to say, reward individual skill specifically. Individual snowballing is fun, team snowballing is not. If we saw patterns contrary to this, we’d make adjustments.

Are you okay with games lasting 30 to 40 minutes?

Zileas: We like games to be in the 30-40 range. We don’t want them to be longer than before. If they are becoming significantly longer, we’d make an adjustment.

Doesn’t this length mean hypercarries like Nasus or Vayne can never truly be shut down?

Zileas: There’s nothing wrong with late game comps as a strategy that is sometimes played. What we don’t want is for long games to be the standard.

Will Riot focus on rewarding individual skill more?

Zileas: Making the game reward individual skill was actually the point of these changes. When they are finished and balanced I think that will become clear to everyone. Our players are becoming more serious about competition and the game over time, and our intent with the game is to not ‘casualize’ but instead to continue to improve the overall quality of competitive play.

We will from time to time add stuff like ARAM and One for All, but those sorts of experiences can thrive alongside the core game without damaging competitive integrity.

Why do you feel team snowball is less fun than individual such?

Zileas: This is a pretty theoretical game design argument, but bear with me.

The game result of ‘win or lose’ comes from some set of things. They have to add up to a 100% control of the outcome. Lots of things go in — team chemistry, counter-picks at champion select, mastery and rune choices, whether or not a champion is currently strong (or not), individual skill, good calls on team objectives, and so forth.

We believed that in season 3, early game kills snowballed the game but were not really super ‘skillful’ compared to other factors in the game. We also thought that a few good early plays on towers could sometimes secure the game — and a few actions in isolation will be more random than consistent play. So, we decided to reduce the importance of certain early game actions that will tend to snowball teams (Tower kills, dragons, first bloods in the jungle fed to a ‘snowballey’ lane — which is honestly a somewhat random, not as much skill-oriented result). From this, we expect that the importance of everything else to go up… because it has to add up to 100%, and we just subtracted something out.

So, by reducing team snowball early game, you must be increasing the importance of individual skill (along with other stuff).

Additionally, the gold changes we made should make it more possible for a support or jungle player to be the star player of their team.

An analogy I’d make is — would the game have more or less skill if we flipped a coin at the beginning of the game and gave 500 gp to the winning team? Obviously, that would still be ‘balanced’ but would be a less skillful game. By cleaning out stuff that over-rewarded relative to the difficulty of doing it, we improve the relative rewards afforded to the things we all agree are important. Also, by making the game tend to reward consistent actions over a period of time, we will tend to favor the more skillful player.

Wasn’t first blood due to a level 1 invade an example of skillful play?

Zileas: It IS a skillful play. It’s not a coin flip. However, it was over-rewarded relative to other skillful play that occurred in games. It would be sortof like if you made the first shot made in basketball be worth 10 points instead of 2 — still skill-based, but will tend to cause more random outcomes and reward the better team with a win less frequently. This has the same net affect on the frequency with which ‘the best team wins’ as adding a small coin flip test.

Does that make sense? By bringing this back in potency a bit, we preserve the potential for people to utilize the skill that DOES exist there without washing out other skillful actions… Bringing them into balance essentially.

Conclusion: Goals for Preseason

Morello: We only really want anti-XP snowball in the long-term. We’re watching this on the team-snowball level (team snowballing not good, personal is) but you need the ability to get an advantage that closes a game.

Average game time is up a bit – this is something we worry about too. I doubt everything is “right” in the world on this, but we need to dig into specific causes after today’s hotfix.

Single Posts

Morello: So far, we have not seen this be true. Some data we have so far:

* Traditional support characters’ winrate is almost unchanged. (Less than 1% delta up or down)
* Other common duo-laners (Annie, Zyra) are unchanged in winrate. Relatively, their winrate is similar to before…meaning this delta is not changing that equation so far (though some changes may be needed as they might have been in S3).
* The two exceptions are Taric (up ~4%) due to new scaling being really strong on him, and Janna (down ~5%) due to global passive change. We’ll likely buff Janna’s core skills a good amount to compensate (woo!)

This is only a few days of data, but right now, the gold delta has had a low effect on general performance (and in this stuff, deltas matter more than absolutes). We do have some hotfix changes to Brace and Jungle coming in today, but supports and bottom lane are actually looking generally more healthy so far based data points.

Ransom: That’s the beautiful thing about the circumstances Yasuo and Riven find them in. The relationship could go any number of directions. It could be a pure rivalry, or it could be a rivalry that turns into a romance, or it could go somewhere else entirely. But to call it a pure rivalry or a pure romance is missing the point. The point is, the relationship is COMPLICATED and provides plenty of fodder for drama. As a fan of our universe, this ambiguity appeals to me. It’s a grown-up vision of human relationships and not a Disney one.